From the Tropics: Cultural Subjectivity and Politics in Gilberto Freyre

Abstract

What are the main contradictions of thinking from the tropics? For the Brazilian sociologist-ethnographer Gilberto Freyre—as for many postcolonial thinkers from Latin America and the Caribbean—this question speaks to larger issues of subjectivity and representation. It addresses social confrontations and power shifts between self and other; at the same time, it alludes to the quest for a modern episteme that both represents and articulates the sociopolitical realities of the individual Latin American and Caribbean nations.

It is like entering another world. The coarse grass, milkygreen in colour, barely conceals the white, pink or ochre-coloured sand produced by the surface breaking up the sandstone floor. The vegetation consists of only a few gnarled and scattered trees with thick bark, glossy leaves and thorns […] But it only has to rain for a few days and this desert-like savannah is transformed into a garden […] In a European landscape, you find clearly defined shapes bathed in diffused light. Here what we consider as the traditional roles of the sky and the earth are reversed.

—Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

And Brazil is so different even from Spanish America as to ask for special treatment in any anthropological or sociological study. So specifically Brazilian in its way of being both “Latin” and “American” that some have gone so far as to suggest that its mystery reminds one of China or Russia: it could even be described as a tropical China.

—Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics